1993 WWF Surprises: Terry Taylor vs. Mr. Perfect

 Terry Taylor vs. Mr. Perfect WWF Raw 1/18/93

ER: Terry Taylor gives what has to be his greatest WWF performance in this match, all while feeling like a total anachronism. Who thinks of 1993 WWF and even remembers Terry Taylor being there? Well, he was there through July and that information seems fake. But whether or not you believe that Terry Taylor was still in WWF in August 1993, we at least have this documented proof of him having a straight banger of a match on the second ever episode of Raw. Can you name even one good Terry Taylor WWF match? I certainly couldn't have. Do people have their own personal favorite Terry Taylor matches? There are probably some people somewhere who do, but odds are it would be against Chris Adams or Flair, and not from his year in WWF that may or may not be real. But this match is the only Terry Taylor match I have seen that rivals his performance in his UWF heel turn against Chris Adams. I don't know what was going on this winter night in early '93, but it gave us the greatest possible version of Terry Taylor.

Now, maybe Taylor rightly thought that he was on the second ever episode of Raw and was being given 10 minutes to work a very game Mr. Perfect. They actually worked each other a lot in WWF, but all of those matches were heel Perfect vs. Red Rooster from a few years prior. This was my favorite version of Taylor, not too different than his aloof heel performance in that excellent Chris Adams match. Aloof Heel Taylor is a fantastic way for him to sell himself. He's like Mark Harmon's also-handsome brother who doesn't get anywhere near as much attention as Mark, and comes off like a guy who thinks he deserves to be bigger than Mark. It's great. Also, it's kind of great because it's just a Flair/Hennig match, and Taylor did a really fantastic Flair. The whole match feels hostile and stiff, but the whole thing is fully worked. It's hard to work a 10 minute match that feels like two guys really lacing into each other, that's really just them perfectly working all of their shots. It felt real chippy from the start, with hard shoving and a mouthy Taylor imploring Perfect to "show him something", leading to Taylor getting slapped. 

I loved the way they went at each other, working a quick pace with fast bumping from both, and a ton of cool offense. Taylor has this fun way of avoiding Perfect, starting some shit and then rolling out of the ring, backing into corners and coming out swinging. It's a Flair performance, but Taylor puts more of an "overly confident coward" twist to it. Taylor's punches look excellent, fast right hands that are worthy of one bump per punch. Similarly, Perfect's chops looked and sounded like they should have been breaking skin. There's so much cool stuff here, but it's mainly because a 1987 UWF match looks totally different than a 1993 WWF match, and a 1987 UWF match looks WAY better than a lot of 2021 wrestling. The big moves look great, like a sick Taylor gutwrench powerbomb, or Perfect dropping Taylor with an atomic drop that looked like it was going to be a flapjack. Perfect had Taylor horizontal over his head, and then swung him down into such a fine atomic drop that Taylor went full Rick Rude for several seconds. This is probably the only WWF match where Terry Taylor used a spinebuster, and that will always kick ass. Flair comes out and punches Perfect a few times, which goes nowhere at all since Perfect gets rolled back into the ring and then hits the Perfect Plex seconds later, but no matter. As a whole, the match blows away any of the praised Doink/Perfect series later in the year. This was a killer match, easily the best Terry Taylor WWF match, and a nice look at just how much they squandered him. He worked mostly house shows for the next 6 months, and it shows that there was literally nothing else he could have done in that ring to put him in better standing. He went out and had this match, and it should have made somebody take notice.